Charles Donald O'Malley

Charles Donald O'Malley (April 1, 1907 – April 6, 1970) was an American Latinist and professor of medical history, recognized as a leading expert on the medicine of the Renaissance and, especially, the work of Vesalius. O'Malley was the president of the History of Science Society for a two-year term from 1967 to 1968)

Biography
Charles Donald O'Malley, a third-generation Californian, was born in Alameda County, California. In 1924 he matriculated at Stanford University, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1928 and an M.A. in 1929. From 1929 to 1943 he taught history and Latin at South San Francisco High School and continued advanced studies in his spare time. In 1939 he married Dr. Frances M. Keddie, a dermatologist and dermatological researcher. In 1943 he returned to Stanford University as a doctoral student and graduated with a Ph.D. in 1945 with an outstanding, comprehensive dissertation on the life, thought, and influence of Jacopo Aconcio. Upon completing his Ph.D., Charles D. O'Malley joined in 1945 Stanford University's history department as the department's general expert on Renaissance history. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1952–1953. He and John Bertrand deCusance Morant Saunders (1903–1991) published extensively on Vesalius, Leonardo da Vinci, Gabriele Fallopio, and other famous, Renaissance anatomists. O'Malley was the author or co-author of papers published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine,     the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences,       Medical History,    and several other journals. By 1958 O'Malley had published more than 20 papers directly or indirectly dealing with the life and work of Vesalius. During his career, O'Malley also did noteworthy research on the Spanish physicians Andrés Laguna, Pedro Jimeno, and Bernardino Montaña de Monserrate. For the academic year 1959–1960 O'Malley was a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1960 he became a tenured, full professor in UCLA's division of medical history in the department of anatomy at UCLA. He was eventually promoted to be the head of UCLA's newly created department of medical history, a position which he retained until his sudden death in 1970 in Los Angeles at the age of 63. He lectured at many American universities and also in Britain, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Canada. During the 1950s and 1960s he corresponded extensively with important, medical historians such as John F. Fulton, F. N. L. Poynter, and Charles Singer.

In the 1950s Franklin David Murphy, as the chancellor of the University of Kansas at Lawrence, unsuccessfully attempted to recruit O'Malley to become a professor at Lawrence. In 1960 Murphy was appointed the chancellor of UCLA, as well as a professor of medical history. During the 1960s Murphy and O'Malley worked together productively. Murphy with O'Malley's help persuaded the directors of the Wellcome Trust to donate 30,000 objects from the Wellcome Ethnological Collection in London to assist the founding in 1963 of a new UCLA campus museum. The new museum was originally named the "Laboratory of Ethnic Arts and Technology."

O'Malley was one of the founding members at the first formal meeting in 1964 of the International Academy of the History of Medicine and was the academy's president from 1967 until his death in 1970.

Awards and honors
In 1956 O'Malley was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was an honorary or corresponding member of the Royal Society of Medicine, the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries (London), and several other prestigious societies concerned with the history of medicine. In 1965 he received the History of Science Society's Pfizer Award and the Commonwealth Club of California's silver medal. In 1969 he received the Prix Eugène Baie II from the government of Belgium's Antwerp Province. As a posthumous honor, UCLA established the Charles Donald O'Malley Short-Term Research Fellowships.

Articles

 * (See Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana.)
 * (See Erasmus.)
 * (See Erasmus.)
 * (See Erasmus.)